A mystery that's hard to fathom; Hawks down to last gasp

Thursday, March 20, 2014 12:50 PM

At the moment, it has to rank right up there with the great mysteries of our time, comparable (not really) to who shot J.R. Ewing, did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone, who really killed JonBenet Ramsey and why hasn’t Pete Rose been inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame?

In actuality, I shouldn’t make light of the matter at all. With 239 lives at stake, trivializing it in any way is totally inappropriate at the least, and downright disrespectful/insulting at the most. But the matter just seems so incomprehensible it really does border on the absurd. Almost as if it’s a modern-day, made-for-television movie rather than reality.

Every person in America, and most of the free world, knows what I’m writing about: The complete and total disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370. What began as a normal “red eye” trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing more than 10 days ago suddenly and inexplicably evolved into a story that’s almost impossible to believe.

Just a few minutes into its journey, Flight 370 amazingly disappeared from all radar screens, and normal tracking devices used to locate airplanes when other systems fail proved pointless. Put another way, it’s as if the massive jetliner evaporated into thin air.

Despite Herculean search efforts that have involved countless countries and just about every conceivable piece of equipment known to man -- from ships to helicopters to satellites – the effort to find any trace of the plane has come up empty. Completely empty. No wreckage has been located. No beeping sounds of the reliable black box. Nothing.

In this day and age when an individual’s whereabouts can be tracked continually through his or her cell phone, how can an airship the size of Water Street just fall off the face of the Earth? With all of the experts and expertise trained on finding the missing plane, it would seem logical some definitive clue would have emerged by now that would lead to 370’s whereabouts, but such is not the case. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

As I’m pecking away at my keyboard Tuesday morning, the location of the passenger jet remains as much a mystery as the moment it disappeared. As one authority stated on NBC’s Today Show, “We’re no closer to finding the plane now than we were over a week ago. We’ve got nothing at this point.”

To read the rest of Rick Fromm's award-winning
column subscribe to Decorah Newspapers at 563-382-4221 for just 34 cents an
issue. Or purchase one at any of the many convenient locations in Decorah and
throughout Winneshiek County.